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London,
Andrew O'Hagan's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Jane Campion.
Cast: Abbie Cornish, Ben Whishaw, Thomas Sangster, Paul Schneider, Kerry Fox
Description: In 1818 London, John Keats shares lodgings with longtime friend, Charles Brown. The building is spacious so Brown rents out half of Wentworth Place to widow Mrs Brawne and her brood: 18-year-old Fanny, 14-year-old Sam and nine-year-old Margaret. Once Fanny immerses herself in Keats' words, she is uncontrollably drawn to the poet and the pair embark on a tempestuous affair.
Country: UK/AUSTRALIA/FR/US. 2009. 119mins
First loves: John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish)
Films about poets are under a lot of strain to prove themselves poetical.
Jane Campion's Bright Star manages to avoid this in some old-fashioned ways: first, by being full of confidence about its artistic vision and second, by being genuinely poetic.
Anybody who thinks "poetic" should mean limp, airy, or flouncy is either not reading enough good poetry or is reading good poetry badly.
Bright Star is poetic, but that is because it is tough, replenishing, beautiful and true - a film about John Keats that conjures the strange spirit of the man.
Based on Andrew Motion's brilliant biography, the movie seeks to express itself by a series of fine discriminations. We first meet the young Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), Keats's first love, in 1819, when he was 24 and she 19.
Our first sighting is over the opening credits, where we see her hands at work, cutting and sewing together the parts of a new dress.
Fanny was Hampstead's notion of a fashion plate and Keats (Ben Whishaw) is quick to notice her on his return from a walking tour of Scotland undertaken in the company of his fellow poet Charles Brown (Paul Schneider).
The Keats who begins his love affair with Fanny is different from the mythical one.
Living in Brown's house, he is given to laughter and to boyish excesses of both laziness and torment, though Whishaw conveys such gentle thoughtfulness at all times that you never doubt the poet is a special soul.
The film is an artist's work about an artist - which the best biopics and biographies always are.
Keats's arrival back in Hampstead is attended by fears and demons - mainly economic ones, Keats's affairs being parlous - but with it we also experience a sense of the man's growing wonder at what he might achieve.
Endymion has just been published. Fanny takes to it and we see her growing overnight into the kind of woman who might be transformed by such writing.
Keats's friend Brown is immediately resistant to Miss Brawne: he has a fellow poet's sense of joint purpose with Keats, is outshone by him but he is not ready to be outshone for a second time by the girlfriend. This makes for a tension that stands at the centre of the drama.
The tension is not decreased when the Brawnes move into another part of the same house. Brown is on the rampage - Schneider's unreliable Scottish accent is a small fault - but he needs the money and rents them space.
We now see Keats and Fanny separated only by a thin, white wall, which is the kind of imagery Campion excels at. She is a genius of tender oppositions.
All her films marry distance to proximity, and marry the free-floating to the solidly fixed. (Who can forget the image of that piano falling through seawater in her little masterpiece, The Piano?)
Keats writes Bright Star for Fanny: "Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath/And so live ever - or else swoon to death" - and suddenly we are steeped in one of those love stories that define what we talk about when we talk about love.
As penury threatens and his talent burns, Keats cannot do without Fanny and soon enough we see another element that might prove a threat to his contentment - illness.
Keats had studied medicine and the first time he coughed blood into a handkerchief he knew he was done for.
It is no secret that Keats died young, but one of the film's achievements is to make you almost believe in the possibility of another outcome.
The love that ignites here seems so crucial to the people involved, so dependent on the oxygen of persistent reality, that we can scarcely countenance anything but its success.
Bright Star is emotional and its emotionalism won't be for everybody. (I could have done without the deployment of the Adagio from Mozart's Serenade in B flat being played over Ode to a Nightingale.) But the film never actually revels in the tragedy of Keats's early death.
Quite the opposite: it revels in the splendid intimacies of his life, his conjuring with language and eternal things, and I can't think of another literary film where the subject's work is allowed such a part, such a deserving part, in the story being told.
I can't remember if a single word of Sylvia Plath's or Ted Hughes's poetry was allowed to inflect Sylvia.
This is a film with beautiful performances and a visual style that urges you towards reflection.
It wants to ask a question about the nature of invention: must every man and every woman invent the thing they love? - yet Jane Campion leaves you alone with that one in the end.
In a season of blockbusters and disaster flicks rolling towards us with grim jollity, Bright Star is that rare and upbraiding thing, a film - perhaps the last one of the year - that seeks not to jam your emotions or scare you silly, but asks you to think about words.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
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